Financial Business Consulting

Business Challenge of the Week – Improve Your Hiring Process

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Most business owners struggle with finding and hiring great employees. Your challenge this week is to analyze your current hiring process and make some improvements. Here are some areas to kickstart your review process:

Do you hire for skillset or mindset? Having the right skills and experience is certainly important but mindset should also be a critical factor. The right mindset includes things like: open to feedback, committment to learning, integrity, kindness as well as sharing your company’s core values.

Do you include your core values in your ad and/or interview process? In order to live your core values at a company level, you need to hire people who share them. Here’s a tip to help attract employees that share your company core values. Place your core values in your ad and ask the candidate to send a paragraph explaining how they demonstrated those values at their last job. If they make the cut to the interview process, after you have met them and asked them if they have any questions about the job they are applying for, ask them to write a paragraph explaining how they would exemplify those values if they got the new position. If you aren’t doing this currently, start immediately.

Do you talk more or listen more during the interview? If you find that you are doing more talking than listening because you are selling the company and yourself over getting to know the candidate, STOP. During the interview process it’s important to ask a lot of questions and let the interviewee talk so you can see how they communicate plus put them in as many situations as possible that they have to react to with real life examples such as how have you handled a situation like this before in your previous positions or how would you handle it if we were to hire you. Don’t make the interview all fluff and no substance. Put them in situations where they have to act like the exercise in #2.

Do you use any personality tests to help with your hiring process? Personality tests can be a huge time saver for your company in the short and long run. Employment personality tests measure choice, preference, values, behavior, decisions, attitudes, and job-related interests. It gives you insight into why people do what they do and helps you determine if they would be a good fit for the position. I recommend you hire a professional to help you determine which tests to use and how best to interpret them and make them part of the hiring process.

Once you are ready to hire someone, do the concert test with them as discussed in last week’s challenge.